Anna Moscowitz Kross (1891-1979)

[Long-time readers of LHB know that each year I research and write a biographical essay for my legal history exam.  If you'd like to read prior ones, start here.  This year's follows.  DRE]

Anna Moscowitz Kross (1891-1979) was born in what is now Belarus but at the time was part of Russia, to a tailor and his wife, Maier and Esther Moscowitz.  To avoid escalating violence and discrimination, the family emigrated to the United States in 1893.  Her two sisters died during the Atlantic crossing.  The family settled in a crowded neighborhood in the Lower East Side of New York City.  Every member of her family worked to supplement Maier’s meager wages.  After school,” a journalist later reported, “Anna came home and sewed on dresses or made buttons.”  In high school she tutored other immigrants in English and worked nights in a suspender factory, although she never worked on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath.  She enrolled in New York City’s leading teachers’ college but quit when the instruction bored her.  Instead, in 1907, at the age of 16, she enrolled in the NYU Law School, where, after her first year, she won a scholarship.  When she entered her first class, Ashe chose a seat near the door, so she would not have to pass through rows of men, who stared at her as if she were some strange being.”  She continued to teach English to immigrants by day but studied law by night.  AI was in a strange land, a foreigner,” she explained.  “I had to show Americans that Russian Jews have stuff in them worth developing.”

When Moscowitz received the second of two law degrees in 1912, she was still so young that she had to wait another six months to be admitted to the bar.  After she was, no law firm she approached would hire her, even though she advertised in a legal newspaper that she would accept any salary.  For two years, she clerked in the law office of a friend for no pay and then struck out on her own.  She also promptly joined the precursor to the National Association of Women Lawyers.

“She had worked and mingled with men all her life,” reported a journalist who profiled her in 1917, “so it was not a strange thing for her to be in the law profession with them.”  “Let woman go about her business, dress sensibly, and appear rational,” she once said, “and she will receive nothing but courtesy.”  Yet at the start of her career, lawyers and judges often exasperated her.  “You went into court with your mind full of your case.  You knew you had prepared it as carefully as would a man,” she explained.  “But the manner of the judge immediately became one of relaxed toleration.  You could almost hear him say, ‘Oh, a woman.  Well, we must bear with her as best we can.’”  Some lawyers were ostentatiously polite, calling her “my fair adversary” and “our feminine opponent,” but then discovered to their sorrow that they had underestimated her.  “I love to match my wits against men,” she told the journalist.  “It is great fun, and I just love to beat them.  You ought to see how foolish men feel when I win a case.”  In 1915, after a week-long trial, she won a verdict on behalf of a carpenter wrongfully excluded from his trade union—the first such judgment in twenty years.  Deeply impressed, several trade unions promptly retained her services. 

Her desire for a career, a journalist wrote, “did not prevent her from marrying.”  On April 5, 1917, she wed Isidor Kross, a surgeon two years her senior, the day before he sailed to Europe to serve in World War I.  Thereafter, she usually used “Anna M. Kross” as her professional name.  Kross considered herself fortunate to have married a professional who accepted her desire for a career.  “My husband says he is perfectly happy and does not feel neglected,” she said.  Presumably, the couple practiced family limitation, because they had only three children (one of whom died at age five).  Presumably, too they hired childcare: judging from a description of Isidor as “a prosperous physician,” they could afford it.  But a journalist went out of his way to report that Anna was “an excellent mother and guide to two young children” and that Isidor considered her “a mighty swell cook.”

While still a law student, Kross campaigned for woman suffrage.  After New York State gave women the vote in November 1917, she became head of the women's division of the speakers’ bureau of Tammany Hall, the nickname of the Democratic Party in New York City.  Alfred Smith, who serve four terms as governor of New York, adopted her as a protégé.  In 1919, she was appointed New York City’s first female Assistant Corporation Counsel.  Her caseload was before the city's Domestic Relations Court, which handled such matters as child support and paternity.  She thought her sex allowed her to make a distinctive contribution to the legal process.  “It is much easier for a woman to understand the psychology of another woman in distress,” she explained.  She also continued to pay due regard to the politicians who got her her job.  In one widely reported “women’s debate” in 1921, for example, she spoke on behalf of Tammany Hall’s candidate for mayor. 

In April 1920, John Patrick O’Brien, a graduate of Holy Cross and the Georgetown Law School and a loyal Tammany Hall member, became her boss as Corporation Counsel of New York City.  Journalists sometimes made fun of his “O’Brienisms,” but one revealed him to be a well-intentioned Catholic layman fumbling his way toward feminism.  “I'm a champion of women,” he declared.  “I’m a home man and a well-trained husband and have always been for anything women wanted.” 

Anna Moscowitz Kross (DRE)

In 1922, O’Brien was elected a judge of New York’s probate court on the Tammany ticket.  In that capacity, he chose lawyers to administer the estates of the deceased and named guardians for minors.  The appointment, in 1924, of a special guardian for the thirty under-aged descendants of J. Pierpont Morgan with interests under that financial titan’s will, was unusually important.  O’Brien chose Kross, who had returned to private practice in 1923.  The caption of the picture reproduced at right marveled that an impoverished immigrant child was now “responsible for the administration of the Morgan millions.”  At that time, Kross was already serving as general counsel to a body that helped the 70,000 members of New York City’s building trades file and pursue claims with the state worker’s compensation commission.  

A new phase in Kross’s career commenced in January 1934.  In 1933, the corrupt mayor of New York had been forced from office, and Tammany nominated O’Brien to compete in a special election to serve out the ousted mayor’s term.  After O’Brien won, Kross raised funds for his campaign for a full term with a “tea” for O’Brien’s wife attended by the spouses of various Democratic luminaries.  In November 1933, O’Brien lost to a progressive candidate, Fiorello La Guardia (who happened to have been Kross’s law school classmate), but on his last day as mayor, O’Brien named Kross to fill the unexpired term of a judge of the Magistrate’s Court.  Such judges occupied the lowest rung in the city’s judiciary, but collectively they processed a half million cases, mostly minor criminal offenses, annually.  Kross considered Magistrate’s Court “the greatest social force for the correcting of individual maladjustments.”  She was promptly assigned to a branch known as the Women’s Court.  

(Continued after the jump.) 

Queering Private Law Conference

[We have the following announcement.  DRE] 

Registration now open for the Bentham House: Queering Private Law Conference [sponsored by the] UCL Faculty of Laws, September 3-4, 2026.  The conference will cover a wide range of private law topics, including contracts, torts, property, IP, commercial, trust, children, families, conflict of laws, and legal pedagogy.  Keynote Speakers: Darren Rosenblum (McGill), Sonia Katyal (UC Berkeley), and Nicholas Allen KC (Deputy High Court Judge; 29 Bedford Row).  Please register [here].  The conference sessions are designed to support professional learning and development. UK-based legal professionals may be able to record attendance at eligible sessions toward their CPD or continuing competence requirements, subject to the rules of their relevant regulator. Participants are responsible for determining eligibility and maintaining their own records.

Private law presents itself as neutral and technical, a body of rules that simply reflects how the world is. But its foundational concepts carry assumptions about whose relationships, identities, and lives count as normal. This conference brings queer theory into conversation with private law, asking what is revealed when we take those assumptions seriously and refuse to treat them as inevitable. It gathers scholars committed to exposing the heteronormative and cisnormative underpinnings of private law doctrine, and to asking how queer theory can transform private law and our assumptions about it.

Lake on Men's Suits for Sexual Misconduct Defamation

Jessica Lake, Melbourne Law School, has published Professional authority and institutional integrity: men's suits for sexual misconduct defamation in nineteenth-century America, open access, in the American Journal of Legal History:

Since the #MeToo movement, prominent men accused of sexual misconduct have frequently brought defamation claims against their accusers and media companies that have published the allegations. This trend has generated a wealth of debate and scholarship, but little research has placed such cases within a historical context. This article seeks to fill this gap in legal history by examining men’s sexual misconduct defamation claims in the nineteenth-century United States. By analysing numerous court records and connecting them with shifts in work patterns and models of masculinity, it argues that men’s claims for sexual misconduct defamation were increasingly connected to the rise of the professions during the nineteenth century. Whereas ideas of ‘male fortitude’ in the face of sexual accusations were central to judicial adjudication of rural men’s claims—particularly farmers—courts took the vindication of the sexual reputations of urban, professional men more seriously. Such scandals had the capacity not just to insult or wound individual feelings or threaten bonds of community or kin, but they could imperil respect for the emerging professions and undermine the authority of social institutions. Scandals involving professors could erode the repute of universities, reports about doctors could undermine respect for medicine, rumours about lawyers could breed distrust of the courts, and news articles about teachers could threaten the education system. Defamation cases show that men’s sexual transgressions mattered most when they questioned the authority of professional expertise and republican projects of other men.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• An alarming opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel of the US Department of Justice advising White House Counsel that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.  WaPo's story is here.

• 
  Having written about two thirds of a history of a law school, word of a new contribution to the genre always intrigues me.  Here's a notice of Legal Education at the University of Virginia: Tradition and Transformation (University of Virginia Press).  DRE

• In the American Prospect: Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont) writes about the Supreme Court's recent decision in Chiles v. Salazar (involving a Colorado ban on "conversion therapy"). The piece also quotes legal historian Marie-Amélie George (Wake Forest University Law School). 

• Via Brian Rosenwald: "Made by History" has a new home. Going forward, it will partner with the Philadelphia Inquirer. New pitch email: madebyhistory@inquirer.com.  

• On Friday, April 10, Alejandro de la Fuente, Harvard University, will deliver the sixteenth annual Presidential Lecture at Tufts University on Slavery, Freedom, Race, and the Law in the Americas.  The lecture will be based on his and Ariela J. Gross’s book, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (THR).

• Over at Divided Argument, William Baude hosts a roundtable with Christian Burset, Jonathan Green, and Ryan Snyder on their recent articles, which Baude describes as some of the best contributions to a "recent round of scholarship on history and tradition in legal interpretation."    

• And over at Modern American History, Sarah Seo hosts a roundtable of historians to discuss  "the benefits of and challenges to translating historical scholarship for a legal audience."  With Laura Edwards, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Samuel Erman, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Maggie Blackhawk and Ned Blackhawk.

• G. Edward White discovers who pranked the U.S. Supreme Court "by filing a phony cert petition challenging an absurd DC noise ordinance" (Oyez).

• That symposium over at Balkinization on Stephen Skowronek's Adaptability Paradox continues, with, among other contributions, Jeremy Kessler's Material Foundations of American Constitutional Development. 

• The latest issue of the Journal of American History includes several articles of interest to legal historians, including One Person, One Vote? The Gap between Representative Equity and Mathematical Equality after Baker v. Carr, by Alma Steingart, which shows how "litigants, Supreme Court justices, judges, and mathematical experts struggled to align the theoretical concept of political representation with mathematical notions of equality" in the malapportionment cases of the 1960s. 

• The NYT review of Mark Peterson's The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History (Princeton University Press) and a blog post by the author.

• The April 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is here. 

• More on Birthright Citizenship.  John Yoo says that it has a long historical precedent (AEI).   Kate Masur  "Fact-Checks President Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order" (CBS Chicago).  John Mikhail on Jurisdiction, Domicile, and the Ratio Decidendi of Wong Kim Ark (Balkinization).  Yet another dispatch from the war between the law professors on the history of the citizenship clause.  (Courthouse News Service).  And has the distance between law professor Bluesky and NYT opinion page ever been shorter? 

• ICYMI: A new book on Sarah Keys Evans, "The Black Veteran Who Desegregated Interstate Buses" (Mother Jones).  Tom Lee on the Declaration of Independence at 250 (Fordham Law). A Century of Colonial Tariffs (LPE Project).  High school students explore Münster’s legal history (Universität Münster).

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Sunday Roundup

• NYU Law's notice of Ashraf Ahmed, Lev Menand, and Noah Rosenblum's article, "The Making of Presidential Administration,” upon its naming as winner of the annual Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law from the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. The notice also includes a Q&A with Rosenblum. 

• Historical research figured prominently in the decision of Judge Chad F. Kenney, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, turning aside a challenge to the qui tam provisions from the False Claims Act on unitary executive grounds (JDSupra). 

• A notice of UC Berkeley professor David Henkin's legal-history-laden course on love, sex and marriage. 

• In March, SWOP NSW will host walking tours of Sydney’s historic "red light district."  “With 8 speakers each evening, the tour will cover both the personal anecdotes of those involved in sex work and the legislation that has shaped their lives. Speakers will share their stories on various topics, including current, historical, and future laws that aim to protect sex workers, as well as the advocates who have been instrumental in achieving these legal advancements." 

• Vice President Mike Pence and former Deputy Assistant to the President Greg Jacob are teaching the course, The Character of the American Constitution, at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.  The first class “walked students through the origins of the Declaration of Independence, exploring what the Declaration meant and where the writers got the ideas.”  (GMU).

--Dan Ernst 

"Law and Justice in the 1950s" (in England and Wales)

Just out from University of London Press: Law and Justice in the 1950s: Case Studies From a Neglected Decade, edited by Fiona Cownie and Rosemary Auchmuty and published in association with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies:

The 1950s was a decade of considerable legal development in England and Wales, despite often being regarded as very conservative in contrast to the more radical 1960s and 1970s. This collection illustrates the breadth of those developments, providing a sociolegal perspective on a range of topics across criminal, property, family, commercial, environmental and public law, and legal education. It examines the social, political and economic context of the decade to reveal how legal developments in the 1950s have much greater significance than has generally been acknowledged to date. Drawing on case studies from the Great London Smog in 1952, the treatment of women in the Wolfenden Report and divorce law reform, to the takeover battle for the Savoy Hotel in 1953, law on the radio and more, the chapters throw new light on current debates about the relationship between law and issues of justice, inclusion and equality in different spheres of activity.

Written for historians and legal specialists alike, this book explores the stories behind the laws in this neglected decade. In revealing the historical context, arguments and controversies raised at the time and the different perspectives of the parties involved, it offers a greater understanding of why we have the law we have now and of these issues as they continue to be played out in the early twenty-first century.

Here is an endorsement that matters: 

This ground-breaking book provides an exciting new perspective on the role of law in England and Wales during the 1950s. New stories not already recorded in standard legal histories are carefully examined, including an eye-opening series on education, and the conjunction between women and the home. Wide-ranging and engaging, it is a fine achievement.  

—David Sugarman, Professor Emeritus, Law School, Lancaster University, UK

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump. 

AHA John K. Fairbank Prize to Sommer

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History ("offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800"). This year's award went to legal historian Matthew H. Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Matthew H. Sommer’s The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China is a landmark study that recovers the hidden lives of gender-nonconforming individuals through meticulous archival research. By combining legal, medical, and literary sources with a nuanced transgender framework, Sommer broadens the field of modern East Asian history, illuminating how embodiment, identity, and social practice shaped Qing society and redefining global conversations about gender and modernity.

Congratulations to Professor Sommer!

-- Karen Tani 

CFP: Queering Private Law

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

We invite submissions for the Queering Private Law Conference at UCL Faculty of Laws on 3-4 September, 2026. This will be the 2026 Bentham House Conference – the flagship conference for the UCL Faculty of Laws.   

Queer theory and private law rarely interact. While queer theory has been applied to other fields, private law remains largely an unexplored territory. Yet queer analysis offers a particularly valuable lens to explore, expose, and reimagine the heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions embedded within private law's foundational doctrines and concepts. 

We aim to publish the conference outputs in an edited collection in a leading international university press. The edited collection will provide a shared vocabulary, conceptual frameworks, and methodological tools that will define this emerging field.  

Scope and Themes.  We welcome submissions addressing any area of private law, broadly defined, including contracts, company law, corporate law, equity and trusts, family law, intellectual property, property, torts, and unjust enrichment.  Some illustrations for topics, questions, and methods include: 

• Foundational concepts: How do concepts, such as consent, capacity, vulnerability, reasonableness, good faith, unconscionability, and the public/private distinction, embed and perpetuate heteronormative assumptions in private law? 

• Comparative and transnational perspectives: Do different legal systems approach LGBTQI+ rights and lived experiences differently within the doctrinal confines of a particular private law field, or across private law fields? 

• Intersectional approaches: How does queer theory intersect with and other critical perspectives including race, disability, postcolonial critique, and economic justice, to illuminate private law doctrine and theory? 

• Pedagogical dimensions: How can we teach private law in ways that expose and challenge its normative assumptions? 

Submission Details.  Please submit a 500-word abstract by February 6, 2026 via this MS Forms.   
Note that, if accepted, a full draft of 5,000-8,000 words inclusive of footnotes must be submitted by June 30, 2026. 

The committee reviewing abstract submissions will generally prioritise authors who express their interest in contributing their paper to the edited volume. However, in the interest of broadening the range of topics, methods, and scholars, we accept submissions from those interested in presenting their papers without contributing them to the edited volume. 

Funding.  To further the conference’s goals and our underlying commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion, promoting under-represented and emerging voices, some funding is available to cover speakers costs in a manner that is attentive to needs, with preference given to early career scholars, under-represented voices, as well as proportionately of travel costs. Our funding is limited, so if you do require assistance, please let us know for which element (travel to/from, accommodation, or both) and estimated costs when submitting your abstract via the MS Form. 

About the Organisers.  This conference is co-led by Haim Abraham (UCL), Niamh Connolly (UCL) Philip Gavin (UCL), Andrew Gilden (Southwestern Law School), Michael Goodyear (New York Law School), and Eden Sarid (KCL) with funding from BA/Leverhulme Trust and UCL Faculty of Laws. 

For more information on the Queering Private Law Project, please visit [here].  For enquiries about abstract submissions and selections, please contact queering.law@kcl.ac.uk. 

ASLH Peter Gonville Stein Book Award to Sommer for "The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China"

We are delighted to pass along news of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, starting with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. 

About the award: "The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award is awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must be published during the previous calendar year." 

This year's award went to Matthew Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024). The citation:

Looking back at a lifelong engagement with Chinese legal history in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with a special focus on gender and sexuality, Matthew Sommer breaks new ground in his most recent book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2024), uncovering several cases with transpeople who have been hiding in plain sight in the source material. The core of the book is based on routine and palace memorials from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but Sommer also supplements his deep source base with popular tales about “the strange,” treaty port journals and newspapers, case books, legal codes, and compendia of traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast to his previous two books, which theorized about gender and sexuality based on thousands of legal cases, this book presents a concise series of case studies that identify what Sommer calls “transgender paradigms” in Chinese legal and social history. Among the figures that appear in these microhistories, we encounter a diverse set of gender non-conforming individuals, including eccentric midwives, cross-dressing clergy, unconventional physicians, and fox spirit mediums. One of the most interesting findings of the book is that while magistrates who prosecuted cases against trans people tended to rely on legal provisions banning heterodoxy, they were often confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate statutes that could prosecute cases involving trans people. Instead, they had to resort to interpretations of law that reveal interesting assumptions about gender, the body, law, procreation, and the fear of the unknown. This compelling and generative book is both a deep dive into complex and dense sources as well as a refreshing intervention into several subfields of legal history.

Honorable Mentions went to: Lauren Benton (Yale University) for The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024) and to Samuel Fury Childs Daly (University of Chicago) for Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press, 2024).

Congratulations to all the honorees! 

-- Karen Tani  

JACH Fall 2025

The Fall 2025 issue of Journal of American Constitutional History is now online:

Of Guilty Property and Civil/Remedial Punishment: The Implications and Perils of “History” for the Excessive Fines Clause and Beyond by Beth A. Colgan

Contrary to the Supreme Court’s historically based determination that in rem forfeitures are nonpunitive, substantial historical evidence—including the Court’s own early opinions—show that in rem forfeitures were understood to constitute punishment.

The Birth of the Dead Constitution: Arthur Machen Jr.’s Early Twentieth-Century Originalism by Austin Steelman

Arthur Machen Jr.’s 1900 Harvard Law Review article “The Elasticity of the Constitution” influenced the long rise of originalism—revealing many of originalism’s now essential features--and helped give birth to a dead Constitution that proved ironically vital and ever-evolving.

Dialogue

Madisonian Liquidation Unliquidated by Jack Rakove

William Baude’s provocative essay on “Constitutional Liquidation,” published five years ago, is the best treatment of the subject. Whether the liquidation of constitutional indeterminacies, to Madison’s way of thinking, is equivalent to the fixation of constitutional meaning, is another matter entirely.

Liquidation, Then and Now by William Baude

If it is true that liquidation did not “deeply engage Madison’s interest,” as Rakove writes, James Madison’s “interest”-level is not something that binds constitutional lawyers. Our historical accounts should be accurate, but our reasons for caring about historical accounts are reasons of our own.

Symposium: Tenth Anniversary of Obergefell—Queer Constitutional History

Queer as U.S. Constitutional History by Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George

Most of queer constitutional history is loss, as well as consolation and survival in the face of devastation. This is a fairly easy conclusion after two decades of the Roberts Court, in the wake of Skrmetti, and amid ongoing efforts to repeal Obergefell.

The Tenth Anniversary of Marriage Equality: How Traditional Marriage Law Led to Constitutional Protection for Same-Sex Marriage by Joanna L. Grossman

Had the history of marriage law been more uneven, it might not have been so relevant to this analysis. But the federal government’s longstanding deference to states in determinations of marital status made clear that this was a case of anti-gay exceptionalism.

The Missing History of Romer v. Evans by Marie-Amélie George

Although the outcome of Romer is well-known, as is its reasoning, the events that produced the jurisprudential turn have largely been forgotten. Uncovering this missing history helps explain how and why the Supreme Court inaugurated a new era in queer rights jurisprudence.

Good Plaintiffs: The Women of Marriage Equality by Zoe M. Savitsky

The early women who sought marriage equality did not look like “perfect plaintiffs.” Neither did many of the successful female plaintiffs in this study. There are, clearly, limits to the current perfect plaintiff tale if we have failed to see these women, intersectionally and multidimensionally.

A Queer Constitutional History of Loss: Mayes v. Texas (1974), Privacy, and the Struggle for the Right to Be Trans in Public in the 1970s by Scott De Orio

The history of privacy and substantive due process rights is usually narrated from the perspective of those cases the Supreme Court decided and that advocates for gender and sexual rights won. But it is also crucial to pay attention to losses, and even cases the Court turned down and to which it declined to grant cert.

“I’m Not Sleazy and I Don’t Frequent Bars”: Respectability as a Legal Strategy in Transsexual Employment Discrimination Lawsuits, 1971-1995 by Shay Ryan Olmstead

Transgender workers did more than simply assert their own normativity—they also actively distanced themselves from other gender crossers.

AJLH 64:3

American Journal of Legal History 64:3 (September 2025) has been published.  
 
Early American versions of a homosexual-advances defence
William B Meyer

Litigating longshoremen in the Lone Star State: black dock workers and the struggle to maintain autonomy after the 1964 Civil Rights Act
D Caleb Smith

The progressive secularization of credit in New Granada and the antecedents of commercial banking in Colombia (1835–1863)
Marcela Castro-Ruiz

The State of Florida v Fortune Ferguson, Jr: the death penalty and legal change in Florida, 1924–1927
Brandon T Jett
 
Book Review
 
Hendrik Hartog, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic
Kathryn Schumaker

The Docket 8:1-2

Volume 8, Issues 1-2 of The Docket, the companion to Law and History Review, is now online:

Sarah Gronningsater: The Rising Generation

A conversation with Sarah Gronningsater about her prize-winning book, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom.

Marie-Amélie George: History as a Beacon of Hope

Simon Rabinovitch–Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History

A conversation with Simon Rabinovitch about his book, Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History.

Dennis Wieboldt III: Natural Law and the Study of “Conservative” Constitutionalism

Jonathan Connolly: Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation

Lauren Davis Jarnach–Negotiating the Arizona Constitution: The Role of Parliamentary Procedure in Ensuring Democratic Textual Outcomes

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• "From Red Lights to Legal Rights": a notice of a book on the recent history of sex work in New Zealand by  Cheryl Ware (University of Auckland). 

• The New York Historical's lecture series in Bryant Park include talks by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Martha C. Jones, Marcus Rediker, and Victor Luckerson (on the Tulsa Race Massacre).  

• The American Historical Association will hold a Congressional briefing offering on the United States Senate on Thursday July 24, at 10:00 a.m. ET in Dirksen Senate Office Building Room G-11 with Joseph Crespino, Joanne Freeman, and Daniel Holt.  
   
• An issue of the AHA Perspectives takes up history in the US national parks, including the censorship of LGBTQ+ History and what the Scopes trial tells us about "school opt-outs" tday.  

• "There is No Original Public Meaning of Imprecise Constitutional Text": Eric Segall's tribute to the late Richard H. Fallon, Jr. (Dorf on Law). 

• 

  Robert M. La Follette (LC)

  Time's Made by History:  Anna O. Law on Birthright Citizenship. Nancy Unger on Fighting Bob La Follette's progressivism.  Antonio Ramirez on investigating Florida's convict labor in the 1920s.    

• ICYMI:  Daniel Tichenor on the long shadow of the McCarran-Walter Act (Conversation).  Bruce Dearstyne on John Jay’s Early Leadership in the Revolutionary Era (New York Almanack). Sharon L. Kennedy, Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, on the Northwest Ordinance and Its Legacy (Court News Ohio).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Mayeri, "Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law"

Yale University Press has published Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law, by Serena Mayeri (University of Pennsylvania). A description from the Press:

The United States is unusual among wealthy western nations in the degree to which the law channels public benefits and private economic resources through marriage. This remains so despite seismic changes in American family life in the last several decades of the twentieth century. During this period, marriage rates declined while divorce and nonmarital childbearing soared. Social movements—for racial and economic justice, women’s and gay rights and liberation, civil liberties, and reproductive freedom—transformed the legal landscape.
 
In Marital Privilege, Serena Mayeri tells the stories of parents and partners, activists and lawyers who challenged the legal primacy of marriage. They made innovative constitutional claims in courts and launched grassroots efforts to change laws and practices that penalized nonmarital relationships. But even though reforms eliminated the most visible discrimination against women, people of color, and children born to unmarried parents—and, eventually, against gay and lesbian Americans—marriage’s privileged status endured. Because marriage increasingly correlated with education and wealth, marital primacy intensified racial and economic inequality. Marital Privilege explains how, as American law selectively incorporated principles of liberty and equality, the benefits of marriage became increasingly unavailable to those who needed them most.  

Advance praise:

“Serena Mayeri’s hugely ambitious project is to map the changing legal status of marriage from the perspective of single women of color, gays and lesbians, feminists who wanted to reform (or even abolish) marriage, alternative family units, and unmarried fathers, among so many others. While the history of marriage looks different when considered from its edges, Mayeri ultimately demonstrates the resilience of an institution that so many labored to change over decades and decades.  This astonishingly comprehensive and organically intersectional book is a masterpiece that will be influential for years to come.” —Margot Canaday

“Mayeri masterfully shows how legal challenges to marriage over the past several decades made marriage itself more egalitarian but left intact marriage’s dominant legal status and preserved marital status as an engine of inequality.”—Douglas NeJaime

“‘Marriage is everywhere in American law.’ What often goes unnoticed by those who enjoy its manifold benefits and privileges is painfully written on the lives in its shadow. In this brilliant history, Serena Mayeri explains how despite a half century of challenges, marriage remains a key engine in the reproduction of inequality today.”—Barbara Young Welke

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani 

Weekend Roundup

• Northwestern Law has a post on the grants Ajay K. Mehrotra received in support of his book project, “American Outlier: Economic Inequality and the U.S. Historical Resistance to National Consumption Taxes.”  On that NEH grant, though, see this and this. 

• Columbia Law's notice of new faculty member and legal historian Kate Redburn.     

• 
  Congratulations to Laura Flannigan, University of Oxford, for winning the Royal Historical Society's first book prize for Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

• Balkinization has completed its symposium in honor of Ken Kersch.  Contributors were Jack Balkin, Rogers M. Smith, Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, George Thomas, Mary Ziegler, James E. Fleming, Linda C. McClain, Carol J. Nackenoff, Logan E. Sawyer III, and Dennis J. Wieboldt III. 

• Also over at Balkinization, Gerard Magliocca ponders "The Mystery of Birch Bayh's Amicus Brief in Reed v. Reed."   

• Samantha Barbas, Iowa Law, recently spoke on the history of freedom of speech and press at the Aspen Ideas Festival.     

• Over three days in October, Maggie Blackhawk, NYU Law, will deliver the 2025 Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government at the University of Oklahoma.  Professor Blackhawk's topic is Colonial Administration: Empire, Civilization, and the Making of Political Science.

• "The Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana has embarked on an ambitious project to create the Indian Law Portal – a comprehensive digital archive of legal documents from each of Montana’s tribal nations" (University of Montana).  

• "Preliminary report into Indian boarding school history lays the groundwork for dismantling policies that have harmed Indigenous people" (Washington State Attorney General).

• “Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect,” a new one-hour documentary, premieres on Tuesday, September 9, on PBS.  "What sets this film apart is that for the first time, [Thurgood] Marshall’s story is told in his own words—drawn from a rare eight-hour oral history recording" Chicago Defender).

• Time's Made by History:  Ryan LaRochelle and Kate Flynn say that History Shows us Why a Non-Partisan U.S. Military is Essential.

• At Inside Higher Ed: Michael Bannerjee (UC Berkeley) draws on the 1819 Dartmouth College case to argue that "Universities Need to Go Corporate"; doing so could "preserve institutional autonomy and defend academic freedom." 

• How the Heritage and the US Department of Education would have us observe the 250th. 

• The Institute of Historical Research has posted online its archive of interviews with UK historians, including Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, E P Thompson, Dorothy Thompson, and Maurice Cowling (History and Policy). 

• The comments on that proposal of the American Bar Association to double the number of required experiential credit hours from six to twelve have been posted online and are summarized here.  Mine is one of them.  DRE 

• The July 2025 newsletter of the Historical Society of the D.C. Circuit is now available here.

• ICYMI:  Brandan Buck on the Lost Liberalism of America First (Cato). Noria Doyle on How Plessy v. Ferguson sparked early civil rights activism from Milwaukee’s Black community in 1896 (Milwaukee Independent).  Alexis Coe, American History columnist for the NYTBR, lists some books to read on the US Supreme Court in "this moment of constitutional crisis" (NYT).  The rare book collection of the the Indiana Supreme Court Law Library (Indiana Lawyer).  Justice Jackson's inclusive original public meaning (Slate).

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• Like us, you might have heard something about limited access to the collections at the National Archives, College Park.  Here is the latest that we've found, courtesy of the American Historical Association.  

• A recording of The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed, a "Town Hall" sponsored by the National Constitution Center, is now online.

• We were very pleased to learn that the Law, Culture and the Humanities has given its James Boyd White Award to Robert W. Gordon.  H/t: SB

• "John A. Kirk, George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been awarded the Susie Pryor Award for his article examining the case of Mary Dinwiddie, the only African American woman sentenced to death in Arkansas during the 20th century."  More.  

• A colloquy with Jill Hasday, University of Minnesota Law School, on her book, We the Men: How Forgetting Women’s Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Minnesota Law).

• "Kim Lane Scheppele will give Chautauqua Institution’s 21st annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, on Monday, August 11, 2025, at 3:30 p.m." (Jackson List.) 

• A report on a symposium on that Magna Carta at HLS (Harvard  Law Today).

• "Etta Haynie Maddox: First Woman Licensed to Practice Law in Maryland" (In Custodia Legis). 

• Also on In Custodia Legis, A History of Self-Representation and How H.H. Holmes Represented Himself in His Criminal Trial, posted by Emily Tejada, a former intern with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress.

• In Time's "Made by History" series: The Lavender Scare and the Long History of LGBTQ Exclusion in America by Joel Zapata. 

• "Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State": Sam Moyn reviews Andrew Preston’s Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security (New Republic).   

• The eighth biennial conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History begins next week at the University of Szeged (ESCLH).

• Lawbook Exchange's June 2025 catalogue of Scholarly Law & Legal History: Part 1 and Part 2.

•  ICYMI:  "What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About SCOTUS’s Trans Rights Ruling" [New Republic, quoting legal historian Kate Redburn (Columbia Law)]. The Constitution is not in crisis; it has already failed, says Jack Rakove (Washington Monthy).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.  

OAH John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award to Olmstead

At its annual meeting in April, the Organization of American Historians awarded the John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award ("given annually for the best PhD dissertation in U.S. LGBTQ
history") to Shay Olmstead (Rochester Institute of Technology) for "‘Refuse to Run Away’: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969–1992," University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2024. The citation:

In this timely, innovative, and thoughtfully structured dissertation, Shay Olmstead explores how trans workers harnessed both civil rights and disability law to confront antitrans employment discrimination in the United States from the late 1960s through the early 1990s. Olmstead spotlights the experiences of over thirty claimants who privileged narrow, individual legal action over collective, grassroots organizing and consciously worked to distinguish themselves from others in LGBTQ+ communities. These trans claimants petitioned elected officials, the courts, and various government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to define amorphous legal concepts such as “sex” and “disability,” albeit in “trans-exclusionary ways” that also authorized “the mistreatment of some gay, intersex, and gender-nonconforming cissexual workers.” Olmstead’s dissertation therefore recasts both queer labor and legal history while also intervening in the fields of disability history and studies. The dissertation ultimately offers a cautionary tale with profound implications for our present moment of rampant (legal and extralegal) discrimination. 

Congratulations to Professor Olmstead!

-- Karen Tani

Booth on the Legal History of the Satanic Panic

Jonathon Booth, University of Colorado Law School, has posted A New Satanic Panic, which is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism:

A broad backlash to LGBTQ visibility and equality has emerged in recent years. Its conservative proponents have asserted that queer people are Satanic, called gender affirming healthcare child abuse, and labeled adults who teach about gender and sexuality “groomers.” This rhetorical shift, combined with an explosion of anti-transgender legislation, may presage a revival of the 1980s Satanic Panic, when fears of brutal crimes allegedly committed by Satanic cults swept the nation. These accusations spurred the longest trial in American history, commanded tabloid news, and led dozens of people to be convicted of lurid crimes, nearly all of whom were later exonerated. Today we are at risk of a similar panic reoccurring, in which baseless criminal prosecutions may be brought against LGBTQ people and their allies, especially in conservative Christian areas.

This Article provides the first historical account of the original Satanic Panic in the legal literature, narrating two major criminal cases and examining the underlying causes of the Panic, including backlash to the feminist and gay liberation movements. It then analyzes the widespread discourse on the political right that connects “gender ideology” to Satanism and child abuse, and the broad adoption of legislation restricting and criminalizing access to gender affirming healthcare. Finally, it evaluates the likelihood of a reoccurrence of the Satanic Panic, weighing the growing animus against LGBTQ people against more encouraging changes, such as improved interrogation practices. It concludes that there is a significant risk that the current moral panic around transgender people could result in a new Satanic Panic. Finally, it proposes actions that lawyers and advocates could take to reduce the likelihood of unjust prosecutions.

--Dan Ernst

Queer Constitutional History: A JACH CFP

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Papers: “Queer Constitutional History” in the Journal of American Constitutional History.  Guest edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George     

We invite scholars in history, law, and related fields to submit articles for a symposium issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History on “U.S. Queer Constitutional History,” to be edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George, in consultation with journal editor David Schwartz.  We plan to publish the symposium issue in 2025 to coincide with 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. At the time the Court issued the Obergefell decision, the opinion appeared to settle specific questions about the legal and constitutional status of marriages between people of the same sex and broader questions about the constitutionality of formal discrimination against gays and lesbians. Since then, the Supreme Court has issued decisions challenging established sexual-liberty jurisprudence, including Justice Thomas’ concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), which promised a reconsideration of the whole “substantive due process” tradition.

We invite essays on the queer constitutional history that gave rise to the Obergefell decision—including events outside of the realms of marriage, family law, or U.S. constitutional law—as well as the place of marriage equality within the Court’s broader sexual liberty jurisprudence.  We welcome contributions on the evolution of marriage equality, queer parenting, and sexual privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as related topics. For example, submissions might examine how and why these rights became recognized, their doctrinal underpinnings, the gaps that exist in Constitutional jurisprudence, and the relationship between queer Constitutional rights and the Court’s decisions in related fields.

We hope to publish a broad array of perspectives on these topics, to help inform scholarship on queer legal history and U.S. Constitutional history, as well as studies of legal institutions more generally. For that reason, this symposium issue takes an expansive approach to all of its terms: “U.S.” extends beyond the mainland to include American territories and the country’s diplomatic and international relations; we take “Queer” to mean research on gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, or asexual people, or otherwise relating to nonnormative and stigmatized gendered and sexualized phenomena; “Constitutional” refers to questions that have been considered in U.S. constitutional courts, as well as related questions that have preceded or transcended them, and matters of state-level and not national constitutional adjudication; and “History” means the study of the past, but not necessarily the deep or distant past, and in this case cannot help but look over its shoulder to connections with contemporary issues.

Abstracts are due February 1, 2025. Please submit them by email to Felicia Kornbluh (Felicia.Kornbluh@uvm.edu) and Marie-Amélie George (georgemp@wfu.edu). Authors of selected articles will be notified by March 1, 2025. Drafts, which should range from 5,000 to 10,000 words, will be due July 1, 2025 for submission to peer reviewers. Final versions of the articles will be due September 1, 2025. The guest editors may propose a half-day conference to immediately proceed the American Society for Legal History’s annual meeting in 2025. Contributors to this symposium issue would be invited, but not required, to participate.

Thank You, Marie-Amélie George!

We here at Legal History Blog are grateful Marie-Amélie George for her guest posts last month inspired by her new book, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge University Press 2024).  If you would like to revisit them, here they are:

Introducing Family Matters!

Legal History from the Ground Up

Writing a History of Progress During a Period of Retrenchment

Collecting Oral Histories

Using Oral Histories

The Pre-Publication Gauntlet

Stories on the Cutting Room Floor

Thank you, Professor George!